Extra Credits – 5 challenges for VR, and my view on their video

VR does certainly have some hurdles to get over, the first VR craze will show us some examples of the hurdles that will need to be overcome. I’m sad that VR didn’t take off in the 90s, but at least it appears to be getting a second chance at the consumer market.

I feel that it’s much more likely for VR to take off this time, the headsets are far more comfortable, computers have become far more powerful, and there will be some games that appear to be very high quality coming out, at least with the Rift.

Here is my take on their points

1 – None of the VR headsets are packaged-in peripherals

They talk a bit about the Kinect and Motion controls during this part of the video, the kinect was a packaged-in, almost mandatory peripheral for the XBox One, people just didn’t like it much. Probably because Motion controls such as the Kinect, and the wiimotes do make people look a bit … silly.

Also the VR Headsets themselves are more like TVs than motion controlls, and your TV/Monitors aren’t usually packaged in with your Console or PC. Both the Vive and Oculus will have their own motion controls though, I wonder how those will work out. the Oculus won’t have the motion controls coming on release, unlike the vive.

On a sidepoint about motion controls, the Wii had motion controls as it’s main input, and from what I’ve read and seen, people did really like it. My biggest gripe with the Wii and the Wiimotes is the fact that a large number of games were right-handed only. Right-handed controls don’t work well for left-handed people like myself. I really hope that the Oculus and Vive don’t have a large number of games like that with their motion controls.

2 – VR isn’t actually good for all games

No, it certainly is not. At least without with some different design choices on the game itself. I’ve seen people talking about how the classic Dungeon Keeper games and Black & White would make good motion control/vr games, thanks to how those games played.

3 – Delayed hardware

This has been bothering a lot of people, as they said, VR started coming up in 2012, now it’s 2016. That is a bit of a long wait. At least it means that they’ve had a long time to work on the hardware and fix a lot of glairing issues that appeared in the Oculus DK1 and DK2. I can’t say anything about the vive though, sadly.

4 – Too much hype

This one could be a problem. I’ve seen when people get too hyped up about a new tv show or movie, just to be disappointed. Some people will just give up on things like that and won’t come back until it isn’t being hyped up so much, that said, I don’t think that being overhyped has really completely killed something, at least unless it was a poor product on top of the overhyping. I have the Oculus DK1 and DK2, I really like my DK2, and am looking forward to trying out the CV1 in March.

That’s what I’m thinking about this, I hope that you have a nice day. 🙂